


Haunt Couture

by cjmarlowe



Category: One Tree Hill, Supernatural
Genre: Crossover, F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-02-22
Updated: 2010-02-22
Packaged: 2017-10-17 11:36:52
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 8,690
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/176452
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/cjmarlowe/pseuds/cjmarlowe
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Brooke has a problem; Dean has the solution.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Haunt Couture

Flea markets weren't the first thing a person would associate with Brooke Davis, and once upon a time she wouldn't have set foot anywhere near one, but Brooke had an eye for the unique and the well-made and she wasn't going to turn her nose up and something stunning just because of where she found it. She'd _wash_ it. Twice. Okay, maybe three times. But she wouldn't turn her nose up at it.

She'd already picked up a handbag, and the most exquisitely made vintage blouse she'd seen in ages, and had only just now found a table of antique amber jewelry.

"Oh, look at this," she said, picking up one half of a pair of earrings. "I _so_ would have worn these two years ago."

"Too bad you weren't here two years ago, then," said the man behind the table kindly. "I don't suppose there's anything else that strikes your fancy?"

Brooke held the earrings up to her ears, gave them some thought, then put them back down again and took a much closer look at the rest of the jewelry on the table. Most of it wasn't her style, or _in_ style, but she was forward thinking enough to pay attention to the workmanship even when it wasn't flashy.

"Oh, this is gorgeous," she said, holding up a delicate silver necklace with amber beads and a tiny locket at the center. She held it against her chest and looked around for a mirror until the gentleman behind the table held one up for her. "The color's so deep."

"It's less valuable on the open market, but I always thought it was the prettiest of the shades," he said. "It looks remarkable against your skin."

"It does, doesn't it?" she said, giving him a friendly grin. "How much?"

"For you? Twenty dollars," he said. "Because it makes it easier to part with these things when they go to someone who appreciates them."

"I'll take it," she said, reaching for her wallet. It was the easiest decision she'd made all day.

:::

It started that night, though it wasn't actually _alarming_ or anything at first. It was just noises and stuff, and lots of things made noises. It didn't have to be weird or anything. Brooke was more worried that she had _mice_ , because when you heard noises downstairs the first thing you thought of was something real.

But there were no mice, and there were no intruders, and there were no snakes or lizards or lost pet gerbils or drafts or misplaced party favors. She checked. Twice.

And then she made someone else come and check for pests for her, because if there was one thing she was wholly unqualified and _unwilling_ to be, it was exterminator.

The noises got progressively louder after that, which was not the end result she was going for. Then one morning she woke to find the front window completely shattered. From the inside.

 _That_ one made the papers, thank you slow news days, and she was just glad she wasn't still in her pajamas when the photographer showed up. Not the police photographer, who was there even before she made coffee and had no interest in photographing her, but the one for the paper.

"Did you see anyone suspicious hanging around?" the detective was asking her, as Brooke tried to figure out whether anything was actually missing.

"No, nobody," she said, and Brooke was a single woman, she _looked_ for suspicious figures hanging around. "Oh my God, do you think someone was hanging out in here and then broke _out_."

"We have to consider the possibility," he said. "Did you have any kind of insurance policy on the house?"

"What?" said Brooke. "I'm _renting_. Do you think that _I_ did it, now?"

"We haven't ruled anything out at this point," he said. "Will you be staying here, Ms. Davis, or is there another address where we can find you?"

"I'm not going anywhere," she said, all the more stubborn now for his questions, "as long as I can get that window boarded up by tonight. Do you people do that, or do I have to find someone else?"

"No," he said, actually chuckling as he put his damning little notepad away. "We don't do that."

"Fine," said Brooke. "Are we done?"

"For now," he said. "They'll let you know when you can start cleaning up."

"Great," said Brooke, and tried not to think too hard about the fact that the spray of glass really was clearly radiating outwards from her front window.

:::

They showed up on a Wednesday morning, and Brooke's first thought was 'hot guys' followed by 'hot _tall_ guys', which was just the way she liked them.

"Hey," said the shorter one - short being relative since the other guy was, like, NBA tall. "Are you Brooke Davis?"

"That depends," she said. "Why do you want to know?"

"Well," he began, hand in his pocket and cocking his head to the side, a smile spreading across his face until the freakishly tall one elbowed him in the side. "Right. We heard you had a break-in a few days ago?"

" _Oh_ ," she said. "You're not from the insurance company, are you? I think you're supposed to talk to the actual owners. I'm just renting for the summer."

"We've already done that," he said smoothly, "and we just need to get your statement of what happened to finish off our paperwork."

"Are you kidding me?" she said. "I must've given it a dozen times already." But not to a couple of hot guys, so at least there was an upside. Even if they worked in insurance.

"It won't take long," he said. "It's just a formality. We want to get it over with just as much as you do."

"I doubt it," she said, "or you two are in the wrong business. Isn't this what you do all the time, every day?"

The other one coughed and said, "Well, most of the time we work out of the main office."

"Oh, because that's so much better," she said. "Well, come in, but I hope you don't think I'm making you breakfast. I don't even make _me_ breakfast."

"There's a place we spotted just up the street," the first guy started, but his partner elbowed him in the side, "which we can enjoy another time. Let's just dispense with the formalities and do this thing. You can call me Rick, and this is AJ. Can we come in?"

Brooke opened the door a little wider to let them inside, even as she raised her eyebrows at him. "Sure, let's do this thing," she said. "What do you need from me?"

"We just need your statement about what happened that night," he said, sliding smoothly into a chair at her kitchen table, where Brooke's coffee was already cooling. "Everything you remember. No detail too small."

"Right, okay, I know the drill," she said, reclaiming her own chair from before they interrupted her morning. "I came downstairs in the morning to find the front window shattered--"

"You didn't hear it?" Rick interrupted.

"I've been sleeping with earplugs in lately," she said. "It didn't wake me up, anyway."

"Just lately?" said AJ. "Did something change?"

"This is just a noisy old house," she said. "At least that's what everyone keeps telling me. I wanted to rent a place with character for the summer, but not _this_ much character."

"Could you describe the noises?" said Rick. "In detail?"

"The last time someone said that to me, they were trying to have phone sex," said Brooke. "They were just noises. Scratches and creaks and bangs and things. Like mice or something, only _not_ mice because I had someone in to check. And I guess they would've had to have been pretty big mice. Or a lot of them."

They looked at one another like that was somehow relevant, even though the local cops brushed it off.

"Do you know when the noises started?" said AJ. "Exactly?"

"What? No," said Brooke. "Maybe a couple of weeks ago? I don't keep a noise diary."

Except, when she thought back, it was actually kind of easy to pinpoint her first night of interrupted sleep.

"Well, that's...very helpful," said Rick. "A couple of weeks. We can work with that."

"So don't you have any paperwork for me to sign?"

"Huh?"

"For the insurance company? The reason you're here in the first place?"

The guys looked at one another again, like _that_ wasn't suspicious.

"We're not actually with the insurance company--"

"No shit."

"--but we _are_ interested in the break-in. Or what they're saying was a break-in, because I don't know about you but it sure doesn't sound like one to me."

"I know, right?" she said. "Who breaks _out_ of a place when there's a perfectly good door? And without taking anything, too. If you're going to bust a window, at least bust out with the good stuff."

"Whatever it was, wasn't interested in stealing from you."

"Don't you mean _who_ ever?"

"If we're lucky," said the guy who probably wasn't actually named Rick.

"Oh, and they still show Simon and Simon on late night television. Just so you know."

Dean winced. "Yeah, that wasn't my best moment," he said. "Look, I'm Dean, and this is my brother Sam. We're here to help."

"I'd love to know how, since you're not cops and not insurance investigators and seem more interested in my pest problem than my break-in."

"Break-out."

"Whatever."

"Well, while Sammy here is going to hit the local library," said Dean, curling his hand around his brother's shoulder so hard the guy kind of grimaced a little, "you and I are going to sit down and have a chat."

"Oh are we?"

"What do you say we hit that little place up the street I saw earlier? I could use a bite to eat."

"All right," she said, "but you're buying."

:::

"So I am like a human bullshit detector these days," said Brooke, sipping her orange juice. "You might as well just tell me the truth from the start this time."

"As soon as I get a bite of my eggs," said Dean, looking like he was having an orgasm as he stuffed them in his mouth. "Sorry," he added, his mouth still half full. "My brother wouldn't let us stop for food on the way."

"Your brother sounds like a hardass," she said.

"No, he's just got time issues," said Dean. "Like it would have made a difference if we'd stopped for breakfast before showing up? The worst that would've happened is you would've had time to finish your coffee."

"I can't tell whether you really like talking about your brother, or you're avoiding the subject," said Brooke. "I'm also not sure whether you want to eat your breakfast or marry it."

"I can't do both?" said Dean. "All right, here's the deal. Odds are good your house has been...infested by something."

"I've already had the exterminators in," she said. "I've already had _three_ exterminators in. It's not bugs, mice or reptiles."

"It's a ghost," said Dean. "We think you have a ghost."

"A ghost?" she said. "Like in poltergeist? Moving furniture and breaking glasses? That kind of thing?"

"No, you're too old for a poltergeist."

"Hey!"

"We think it's just a run of the mill ghost, probably someone who died in or around the house. Sam's looking into the history of the place now. We can probably have it taken care of before dinner."

"You're serious."

"Dead serious," said Dean, and shoveled another mouthful of eggs into his mouth. "Do you know if there were any rumors about the place being haunted before you moved in?"

"You think I would have moved in if I thought it was haunted?" she said. "All I wanted was a nice little place for the summer. You know, get out of the city, recharge, find some new inspiration. Not get scared half to death by some stupid ghost."

"Well, that's what we're here to take care of," he said. "Sam's probably already found out who it's the ghost of. Hell, he might be halfway to the cemetery already."

Brooke thought about asking just what the cemetery had to do with it, then decided that she probably didn't want to know. This was all a little too Twilight Zone already.

"So what are you, like, the ghostbusters?"

"Do I _look_ like Bill Murray?" said Dean. "No, I don't think so."

"Well, maybe in the right light...."

"For the sake of my ego, I'm going to pretend you didn't just say that."

"He was kind of hot, back in the day. Before he got old."

"We're not the ghostbusters," said Dean sharply. "We're the real deal. I mean, plasma streams? Containment mainframes? Really? Give me a good ol' shotgun any day."

"Shotguns will always be sexier than jumpsuits," she agreed with him. "So you can shoot a ghost with a shotgun? Really? They sure don't tell you _that_ in the ghost stories."

"Well, with salt," said Dean. "The shotgun is just the delivery mechanism."

"So, you know that you sound crazy, right? Not that I'm saying you _are_ crazy, but you sound completely wacko."

"Yeah, I know," said Dean. "We get that a lot, right up till we take care of people's little problems. Sometimes not so little problems. Well, actually, most of the time they're not so little."

"So what happens now, then? What do we do?"

"We?" said Dean. "The only thing you need to do is tell me if there's anything else weird that happened that you haven't told us about already. Did something change a couple weeks ago? Did you do any renovations on the house? I don't know, do any digging in the basement?"

"What? No," she said. "The only thing I did a couple of weeks ago was some shopping. Which, believe me, is not something new for me. More like a daily occurrence."

"Is there anything you can think of that changed? Anything at all?"

"Not while I was here," she said. "I was out of town for the day just before it all started, but I doubt anyone broke in and dug up a body in the basement while I was out."

"Where did you go?" Dean asked her immediately. "What did you do?"

"I don't know, I went to the beach, did some shopping at a flea market, took myself out to a nice dinner because I deserve to be treated right, even if it's just by me."

"Hm," said Dean, and she wasn't sure if he was thinking about the case, or the dinner. "What did you buy?"

"What did I _buy_?"

"Just covering my bases," said Dean. "If it's not the house that's haunted, it might be you. Anything you did right before it all started might be important."

"I didn't buy anything weird," she said. "Just an old blouse and a purse," she said. "And a necklace, but it wasn't creepy or anything. And dinner. I don't know, maybe I had some haunted potatoes."

"A necklace?" said Dean, latching onto that right away. "Was it an antique necklace, by any chance?"

"Yeah," she said. "It's this pretty locket, all dark amber and silver."

"So I'm guessing you wouldn't be too keen on giving that up, then?" said Dean. She thought he was kidding at first, but that was definitely a hopeful look on his face.

"Oh, I get it," she said. "What are you, con artists? Antique dealers? What? You're probably not even brothers, are you?"

"Oh, we're definitely brothers," said Dean, "and we don't deal in antiques. Well, not in the way you're thinking anyway."

"Right," she said. "I just bet you aren't. I think we're done here, and no, I do not need a ride home."

"Whoa, hey, wait," said Dean. "We were having a good conversation here, what happened?"

"What happened is I've stopped being an idiot and caught on to your little con here," she said. "Ghostbusters? Seriously? I must have been blinded by your...." She just gestured up and down at him. "I know better."

"Hey, I’m not trying to pull one over on you," he insisted. "You really are in danger, and we really do know what to do about it."

"Yeah, I just bet you do," she said, getting up from the table and happily leaving him with the bill as she readied to storm off. "You can call off your little con now because I’m not biting. And if I see you around my place again, I'm calling the police."

She didn't even let the guy answer before she took off. She was done letting a pretty face get the better of her common sense.

:::

The guy was so full of shit. She didn't know what the necklace was really worth, but maybe she needed to find out if he was so hot to get his hands on it. No, what she really needed to do was install some video cameras downstairs so she could catch him and his brother making those noises to scare her into giving up her jewelry.

Seriously. _Ghosts_? They couldn't have some up with something better than that? Something about it being a family heirloom that had been lost?

She might even have swallowed that one, and anybody with Photoshop could doctor up a few pictures of some old family member wearing it. It would have been twenty bucks down the drain but she probably would have even felt good about handing it over and never would have known the difference.

Brooke let her anger simmer all afternoon and well into the evening, using the energy to scrub the house spotless, which it didn't really need since she'd had a service come in after the window incident, but she did it anyway. There were few better outlets for her anger right now that didn't involve destruction.

It was after dark when her little fit of mania finally started to subside, and she went upstairs to moisturize her hands after the cleaning products did a real number on them. When she got up there, though, she decided a good bubblebath in her big old clawfoot tub first would be even better. By the time she came back downstairs she was pampered and relaxed and in a much better mood.

She might not even go after those guys' asses if they stayed out of her way.

She was about to open a bottle of wine, in fact, when she smelled something that was a little bit like her dinner burning. Only she wasn't _making_ any dinner. And she hadn't lit any candles and she definitely didn't have any incense burning. And when she took a look around she didn't see anywhere it could be coming from anyway, so maybe someone was burning some leaves or something nearby and it was leaking in under her door.

When she carried her glass of wine out into the living room, wrapped in her silk robe and damp hair pinned up on her head, she sat down and looked up at the curtains covering the window that _wasn't_ currently boarded up, and watched them burst into flames.

"Oh, you assholes!" she shouted, wine glass shattering on the floor and red wine spilling everywhere as she leapt off the couch and instinctively went for the fire extinguisher. She emptied the whole damn thing on the curtains then, when they were only smoking and not flaming anymore, she tore them down from the window and threw them in the middle of the floor and beat them with a pillow till the last of the fire was out.

She couldn't believe they would go _this far_...except she had no idea how they would rig the curtains to ignite like that, out of nowhere. And then when she looked up she felt a chill go right up her spine when she saw what was unmistakably a _transparent person_ in front of the window. _That_ was no trick of mirrors or projectors. It flickered out moments after she looked, but she knew damn well what she saw.

"Oh, fuck this," she said, and didn't pause for any longer than it took to throw on some real clothes before she was out the door.

She didn't know where they were staying, but this was just _not_ that big of a town so there were limited options, and Brooke would know that car of theirs anywhere.

She found it parked in front of a twenty-four hour diner a little further out from the shore, the one with flickering neon in the sign and cracked pavement in the parking lot. A local dive, not the kind of place that tourists usually went to. She pulled in right next to them and headed straight into the restaurant.

"They just burst into flames!" she said, throwing her hands up in the air as she stormed towards them like that could in any way simulate the burning curtains. "Right in front of me!"

"Whoa, back up," said Dean. "You want to start at the beginning and catch us up?"

"That is the beginning!" she said. "Nothing happened before that! One minute everything was normal, and then next minute poof!"

"Do you want to sit down?" said the other one. Sam.

"No!" she said. "Yes! And then I saw this _thing_." She slid into the space Sam made for her without even stopping talking and gesturing. "You didn't tell me that things were going to start _burning_."

"We didn't know," said Sam. "We, uh, actually don't know much. I couldn't find any record of who the ghost might be."

"It's a girl," said Brooke, making ringlet gestures with her hands in front of her shoulders. " _I saw her_. Oh my God, I'm never going to listen to a ghost story the same way ever again. That wasn't romantic at all!"

"Yeah, they never are," said Sam. "They're either angry or tragic, most of the time."

"And scary!" said Brooke. "Don't forget scary!"

"Just wait till you see one of the _really_ scary ones," said Sam. "They don't usually have ringlets."

"Well, sometimes they have ringlets. Ringlets are creepy."

"I don't want to see another one!" said Brooke. "I just want to get rid of this one!"

"Well, you're not going to like this," said Dean, "but with Sammy here coming up empty, our best bet is that locket of yours. Which we _don't_ want to steal and sell on the black market, by the way. Or any other market."

"What do you want to do with it, then? Do you have a way to uncurse it?"

"Sort of," said Dean, then they looked at one another again and that kind of expression never boded well, in Brooke's experience.

"What does that mean, sort of?"

"It means that we need to destroy it," said Sam, and it was obvious he was trying to be kind, but it was equally obvious that he was _trying_ , that his real priority was on getting this done.

Well, she guessed that was very professional of him. It was comforting, in a way.

"And that's going to work?" said Brooke.

"Well, we'd better hope it does," said Dean, "because if it doesn't we're going to have to come up with some other ideas and do some more digging. But generally speaking, no locket, no haunting."

"No locket, no haunting," said Brooke. "It's pretty, but it's not _that_ pretty. Sure, go ahead, light that bitch on fire."

:::

The seared curtains were still in the middle of her floor, and even though the fire was long since out Brooke looked at them and would swear they were still smoldering just to spite her.

Dean whistled at the sight. "You weren't kidding," he said. "Those must've gone up fast."

"I thought the whole house was going to catch on fire," said Brooke, "but nothing else even got hot." The floor underneath them was smeared with ash, but not scorched at all. "I thought you guys did it, at first."

"Why would we set your curtains on fire?"

"To scare me into giving you the necklace!"

"You thought we broke in here, soaked your curtains in something flammable and rigged an ignition device, you mean?" said Dean. "If we'd already broken in, wouldn't it have been easier for us just to steal the necklace?"

"That's not important!" said Brooke. "I just want to get rid of this thing now."

"Well, we might as well get right to it, then," said Sam. "The necklace?"

"I'll go get it," said Brooke, and was happy to leave them with the ruins of her curtains. It wasn't even tucked away hidden in a drawer somewhere, it was right out on her dresser, and despite everything Brooke still held it up to her throat in the mirror and admired it for a moment. It really was beautiful, and even more beautiful when worn by someone.

But it was also responsible for scaring the shit out of her for the past couple of weeks, and no amount of pretty was going to make up for _that_.

"Well, I guess this is goodbye," she said, and balled her fist around it and carried it back downstairs.

"Have you got it?" said Sam, standing up from where he'd been examining the curtains. Brooke wasn't sure what he was hoping to discover, other than that they were burnt and also kind of ugly, which should have been obvious within about ten seconds.

"Here it is," she said, dangling it from her hand and letting Dean snatch it from her. "You're probably going to need a blowtorch or something to melt this down."

"Yeah, we've got that covered," said Sam. "I'll just go get that out of the car."

Of course they had a blowtorch in their car. Of course they did. She didn't even want to think about what else they might have stashed away in there. It seemed to be pretty roomy. Apparently it took more than some little handheld device and nerves of steel to go ghost hunting, despite what her television told her.

By the time they were done, Brooke's necklace was nothing but a pile of slag and a few bits of amber that she considered picking out. "Can I keep these?" she said. "Or are they still going to be haunted."

"No, this will have taken care of it," said Dean.

On second thought, Brooke wasn't sure she wanted to keep them anyway, pretty as they were. "Actually, why don't you guys take them. Even if they're not haunted anymore, they're probably going to give me nightmares."

"No problem," said Dean, pocketing the whole thing. And those, she suspected, he was going to sell. But at this point he could do whatever the hell he wanted to do with them as long as she wasn't haunted anymore. "So I guess that's it then."

"And nothing else is going to happen? No more bumps in the night, no more broken glass, no more _things bursting into flames_?"

"Not unless you ignite them yourself," said Dean.

"Huh," she said. "That was spectacularly anticlimactic."

"Well, listen, let me give you the number of the motel we're staying at, in case you need any--"

"Wait, what? I'm not staying here tonight! Are you crazy?"

"It's totally safe," said Sam. "Okay, it smells a little smoky, but open some windows and that'll clear out in no time. Trust me, we have some experience with that."

"No way," said Brooke. "Maybe, maybe if tomorrow I come back and nothing new is broken, shattered or burnt, then I'll move back in."

"You'll have to stay with us, then," said Dean.

"I’m not staying with you!" she said, just as quickly. "I'll get a hotel room."

"We're staying at the Lucky Star Mo--"

"A _nice_ hotel room," she said. "One with clean sheets and room service. Which is exactly what I'm going to do for the entire time next time I decide I need to get out of the city for a little while."

"Well, suit yourself," said Dean.

But it was high tourist season right now, and there wasn't a room to be had anywhere in town, not even the stupidly expensive ones that Brooke was totally willing to spring for. Actually, they were the first ones she tried for. There was nothing but the Lucky Star.

It was still better than staying in her own place, where there was no way she was getting the slightest bit of sleep tonight. She got the room next to Sam and Dean, hoping they didn't keep their television too loud, and when Dean asked her over for a beer she was definitely in no state to refuse.

"So this is the craziest job ever," she told them, claiming someone's bed - it was freshly made so she just perched herself on top - and stretching her legs out in front of her as she sipped her beer. "You guys have the craziest job ever."

"You don't even know," said Sam. "Today was nothing. Today was like a vacation day. You wouldn't believe some of the things we've seen."

"If they're going to give me nightmares, I don't want to know," said Brooke. "Are they going to give me nightmares?"

"They give _em_ nightmares," said Sam, "so it's a good bet you don't want to know."

"How do you even start doing this?" said Brooke. "Because believe me, I've never seen a help wanted ad for something like this."

"Just sort of fell into it," said Dean, with a little shrug that suggested either he didn't want to talk about it, or there was just too much to tell. "It's how we grew up. It's the family business."

"But there's got to be good stuff too, right? It can't all be death and destruction and blowtorches."

They looked at one another again and she suddenly felt a little cold, like maybe that really was all there was to it. But then Dean said, "We save people," and she sort of got it a little more. "And yeah, sometimes there's good stuff."

Sam went to bed first but told her to stick around, that he could sleep through anything. So Brooke accepted another beer when Dean offered it to her, and moved off the bed and onto the floor next to him, backs to the wall.

"So what brought you out here for the summer anyway?" said Dean. "You don't seem much like a small town girl."

"You'd be surprised," said Brooke with a little smile. Though it was certainly something she'd never call herself. "I'd been working a lot, maybe too much, getting a business off the ground. I guess I felt like I needed to remember why I do it in the first place."

"Okay, yeah," said Dean. "I get that."

"Do you know what that's like?" said Brooke. "To just want to run away from where your life is taking you, for a little while?"

"You have no idea," said Dean, but he didn't give her one, either. And she didn't push him for it, because that look on his face was awfully shut off, right at the moment.

"I love what I do, and I love my life, but sometimes you just need to get _away_ ," she said. "Sometimes it's all just too much. Sometimes you just want to be someone else, just for a little while."

"Sometimes I really wish I could," said Dean. "It would be so much easier to have a normal life, to have a place to come home to. To have a nine to five job and _not_ need to take care of all the things that are out there in the world."

"Nine to five jobs are overrated," said Brooke, though there were days when she sort of wished she had one of those too. "But getting away from it all, sometimes you just need to."

"Hard to get away from the whole world," said Dean, and that was true on such a fundamental level that Brooke almost felt like something shifted inside her when she heard it. She held her beer bottle up for Dean to clink against his, and after that they were quiet for a little while.

"Well, I should go to bed," she said when the beer was gone. A part of her wanted to stick around and talk, but a bigger part of her was finally starting to crash, and if she stuck around she was going to end up sleeping right here on the floor.

"We'll be here if you need anything," said Dean, getting to his feet and offering her a hand up. "Just knock on the door."

"Or bang on the wall," said Brooke with a wry smile. "Night, Dean." And pushing herself up on her tiptoes to give him a kiss on the cheek, she headed out the door.

:::

The house was intact when she arrived the next day, Sam and Dean pulling up right behind her, but she didn't really believe it until she went inside and checked out the whole thing, room by room. And since she'd run out with just the clothes on her back last night, she took the opportunity to put something else on while she was alone up in her bedroom before meeting them back downstairs again.

"You were right," she said, finding them both on the couch looking at something on Sam's phone. "Everything's fine."

"Good," said Dean. "And, uh, sorry about the locket. I know you liked it."

"At least I still have this blouse," said Brooke, putting a hand to the hollow of her throat where the locket should have been, "so the shopping trip wasn't a complete bust now that the locket's toast. I should have known it was too good of a bargain at twenty bucks."

"Hopefully it wasn't irreplaceable," said Dean. "Flea markets are surprisingly dangerous places."

"And here I though the main danger of flea markets were actual fleas," said Brooke. "So I guess this is it, huh?"

"You have my phone number, and about five other ways to reach us in an emergency," said Dean. From the look Sam gave him, they generally didn't hand that kind of extensive information to everyone, which made Brooke feel at least a little warm and fuzzy.

"No offense," she said, "because you're really hot, but I really hope I never need to use it."

"You'll be fine now," Dean promised her, though he lingered at the door for a few moments before he gave her a smile and a two fingered wave and they were out the door.

In a weird way, she was kind of going to miss them.

But for the next little while she was more concerned with cleaning up the mess of the curtains in the middle of her floor than thinking about a couple of ghostbusting brothers. It was actually a pretty simple job, mostly consisting of a garbage bag and a mop, but Brooke devoted her full attention to it because it was a lot easier than thinking about what had happened to put the curtains in that state.

It was all a little surreal now. Not that it hadn't been surreal when she was in the middle of it, but now that her life was back to some semblance of completely normal, it was a little hard to believe that it had all happened to her, that it wasn't just some crazy story someone made up.

The feeling lingered all day, and probably would for a long time to come until maybe one day she would come to believe that she _was_ remembering wrong, that it was just a dream she had one time when the truth was it really had just been mice in the walls.

But when night fell, when Brooke ordered in dinner from the one good Chinese place in town and then went out back because she felt very conspicuous in front of a wide open curtainless window, she felt a unexplained chill go up her spine. At first it was nothing, not really. A faint tapping that could have been the wind. A creak that might've just been the shifting of the house.

Then a small mirror fell off the wall by the back door and cracked right down the middle, and Brooke went racing inside for her phone.

She barely got Dean's number dialed when the furniture started shaking, when a wind picked up in the room and when she kept thinking she saw an apparition at the corner of her vision. If the Winchesters were already way out of town then she was fucked, she was _so fucked_ , because this ghost didn't seem content to just bang on a few walls anymore, it seemed ready for an out and out assault.

"It's back!" she said before Dean even finished saying hello. "Where are you?"

"Still at the motel," he said. "What's happening?"

"I don't know, everything! Stuff's _flying_ in here!"

"We'll be there in five minutes," said Dean, and it took six, which Brooke felt every second of until they burst through her front door so forcefully that if she'd accidentally left it locked on them, she bet they would have just kicked it in.

She didn't have to explain to them what was going on, it was going on around them, objects shaking, paintings tapping against the walls, and a low sound underneath it all, part groan and part howl. It send more chills through her with every passing moment.

"It started out in the back yard," she said, "and then followed me in here."

"I'll check out the back yard," said Sam immediately, getting a curt nod of acknowledgement from Dean, and as much as they might bicker the rest of the time, they clearly had their shit together when it came to this. They worked together like they really had been doing this all their lives.

This time, when Brooke so a flicker at the corner of her vision, it really was what she thought it was. "Dean!"

"I see her," said Dean, raising his shotgun. Brooke saw it go up, but she still wasn't prepared for the blast when it went off, flinching and all but ducking. It worked, though; as soon as the salt hit her, she was gone.

"Is that it?" she said. "It is gone now?"

"For the moment," said Dean, grimacing. "But it'll be back. That's just a temporary measure."

"Well then what do we do to make it permanent now?" said Brooke. "Because I want her permanently out of here."

"This doesn't make any sense," said Dean. "We did everything right. The locket made sense, in a house with no prior history of haunting. A locket of unknown provenance picked up right before the incidents started? It was a total gimme." Brooke almost tried to contribute to the conversation, but it was pretty clear he was talking to himself and not her. "We couldn't just have a simple one for once? It couldn't just go away when it was supposed to?"

"So seriously, what do we do now?"

"I don't know, let me think," said Dean. Objects were still trembling and jumping in place, from the smallest picture frame to the heaviest table, and she had no idea how he could think in the middle of that chaos, much less with a shotgun in one hand and eyes that still searched every corner of the room as they stood there. But somehow he did.

"Sonofabitch," he blurted out suddenly, but before he could explain himself Brooke's throw blanket burst into flames, right there were she had it hanging over the back of the couch. Brooke moved on instinct again to try to smother it, recklessly putting herself right in the path of a sliding end table that clipped the back of her calf. While she tore the blanket off the couch before it too ignited, she caught a flicker at the corner of her eye again and heard Dean fire another round behind her.

She beat the blanket with a throw pillow and even in the middle of everything she managed to get most of the flames out, though she had no guarantee it wasn't just going to ignite again a moment later; there was certainly enough left to burn.

There were a lot of things in this house that could burn. Including them.

"It's your shirt!" said Dean, firing one more round. Brooke hadn't even _seen_ anything that time but the noise was becoming insane, like a raging storm inside her living room.

"You want to talk about my _shirt_ right now? What's _wrong_ with you?"

"You need to take it off!" said Dean. "Right now!"

"I have heard a _lot_ of lines in my time, but that has got to be--"

She didn't even finish the sentence before Dean's hand was grabbing a fistful of her blouse so tight that the top two buttons went flying. Brooke slapped him and grabbed at the shirt to close it again.

"It's not the necklace, it's your _shirt_ ," Dean said again, shotgun drooping as he rubbed the side of his face with one palm. "The necklace wasn't the only thing you bought that day. It's your _shirt_ , it's what's haunted. Vintage, right? Authentic vintage. If we get rid of the shirt, we get rid of the ghost."

It still sounded like the worst pickup line Brooke had ever heard, but if it _was_ a line and he'd gone to this much trouble to set it up? He probably deserved to see her with her top off anyway. She let go slowly and Dean didn't waste any time pulling it off her.

"Behind you!" he said, as if Brooke could _do_ anything about what was behind her except for duck. Which was what she did.

Dean fired and she felt a spray of salt over he shoulders as she thrust the shirt in his direction.

The flame on Dean's lighter kept going out the moment he lit it, gusts of wind blowing through her house, but he finally managed to get it ignited, and once he did the whole thing went up far, far faster than it physically should have.

As soon as it was all gone, ash on his hands and on the floor in front of him, everything in the room was still and quiet again, except for a thankfully-not-antique vase that had landed too precariously and toppled off an end table, smashing to pieces on the floor a few long moments after everything else stopped.

"Is it over?" she said, standing almost perfectly still in the middle of the room and barely moving even her head as she looked around.

"It's over," said Dean, dropping his shotgun. "It's done now."

She practically sagged with relief, taking the three steps over to Dean and throwing her arms around him. "Thank God," she said. "That was seriously fucked up."

"Always is," he said, and his hands felt rough and hot on her back. "Uh...not that I don't want to take advantage of the situation, but you're not--"

Brooke pulled back just enough to kiss him firmly on the lips. Enough was enough. "So I've got a head start," she said. "Catch up, would you?"

"This would definitely be taking advantage of--"

"Are you kidding me?" said Brooke. "Shut up and let me take advantage already. What good's a heroic rescue if you don't get to hook up with the rescuer?"

"Oh, you drive a hard bargain," said Dean, but Brooke had been around, and she knew that tone of voice. He was hooked. "But Sam."

"Sam!" she called out immediately, without taking her eyes off Dean. Sam was there in a moment, had probably been on his way already as soon as everything had abruptly stopped. "We took care of it."

"What happened?" he said. "One minute I was firing at an apparition, the next everything stopped." He certainly didn't miss Brooke's half-dressed state, nor his brother's arms around her.

Dean cleared his throat. "It was her shirt," he said. "It must have belonged to the ghost, maybe had some remnants of her woven into it somewhere. Or maybe she was just _really, really_ attached to it. We, uh, burned it."

Which, ew. Brooke kind of wished he hadn't spelled that part out for her. She really, really hoped that by 'remnants' he meant hairs or something, because anything else was just too gross to think about.

"Well, that's a new one," said Sam. "You _had to_ burn her shirt."

"So, uh, you can go," said Dean. "Back to the motel. I think I can take care of it from here."

"I just bet you can," said Sam, smirking. Brooke just narrowed her eyes at him and gave him a definite 'thanks but back off' look. She didn't want to seem ungrateful, after all. "I’m taking the car, then."

"I can get a ride back to the motel," said Dean. "Uh, right?"

"He can get a ride," Brooke confirmed, eyes right back on Dean again. "I'll take good care of him."

If Sam had anything to say about _that_ , he kept it to himself this time. He just gave his brother a mock salute, gave Brooke a smile, and with his shotgun over his shoulder he headed out the door.

"Now, where were we?" said Brooke, reaching for Dean's shirt. "I think we were right about here. Or was it here?" And she slipped her hand right underneath it, fingertips sliding along his warm and slightly sweaty skin.

"I think you've got it now," said Dean. "But how about we take this upstairs? Less smoke and not quite so much broken glass. At least, I assume so. I can't really speak for the state of your bedroom. Yet."

She was about to say something appropriately clever and suggestive when the doorbell rang. Then, when they both froze and looked at it, it was followed by a heavy knock and a teenager's thin voice.

"Shit," said Brooke. "My Chinese food."

:::

They left the food in a bag on the scratched-but-intact coffee table and didn't waste any more time racing up the stairs to Brooke's room. The bed wasn't made which bothered Brooke more than it bothered Dean. She tried to roughly make it; he just tried to mess it up again.

"Let's see what we can do to get the rest of those clothes off you," he said, pulling his own torn and stained t-shirt off over his head.

"Are you as good at that as you are at ghostbusting?" she said, leaning back on her elbows invitingly. He didn't need any kind of coaxing anymore, though, and she had a feeling he had the goods to back up his words.

"Let's find out," said Dean. He certainly had talents as far as undressing went, anyway; her bra was unhooked before she even felt his hand slip behind her, and she couldn't have slid her pants off more smoothly if she'd done it herself.

She was actually sort of ready for the typical macho guy, straight to business, but Dean surprised her. He undid his pants but left them on, loose around his hips and just barely clinging to his body. Instead he leaned over her, gave her a kiss that was simultaneously both hot and tender, then kissed his way down to her breasts, lavishing them with attention.

She was so wet by the time he finally moved away to strip his pants off that she felt like she was going to die if he didn't touch her soon, if he didn't start fucking her as soon as he got the condom on.

"Enough foreplay," she said, wrapping a leg around him to pull him closer. And Brooke had very strong, very persuasive legs.

He certainly wasn't going to argue with that, though he took it at his own pace, hanging on to her hips as he so slowly pushed inside her, making her feel every moment of it. When he was in she wrapped both legs around him so he wasn't going anywhere. Not that she thought he was going to try.

He wasn't the pump-till-you drop type either, he made sure she was comfortable but he didn't coddle her, and he varied his thrusts, fast and slow, deep and shallow, until she was practically tingling all over from the anticipation of it. When he got close to coming, though, he wrapped an arm around her back and pressed his lips against hers and made those jerky, erratic thrusts until he gasped and let out a harsh huff of breath and held himself almost perfectly still for a few moments.

She didn't even mind that he'd come first.

"Don't move," murmured Dean when he finally backed away from her, quickly dealing with the condom with the practiced ease of someone who was not only experienced, but experienced at being classy about it. "I'll be right back."

And he was right back to give her another kiss on the lips, slow and wet, then to kiss his way down her body until he was back between her legs again, spreading her thighs with rough, sure hands and then licking at her between them.

"Oh," she breathed, and _that_ she hadn't been expecting, _that_ was not a part of the 'intense rescue sex' she'd made up inside her head.

It was so much better.

Dean didn't say anything at all, though he hummed a little against her as he licked into her, as he tongued and sucked her clit, and he kissed and sucked and fingered her to a stunning orgasm. And then, when that one had subsided, did it all again.

She was absolutely wiped out when he was finished with her, boneless and content and hyper-aware of everything as she lay back on the bed and stared up at her ceiling. Dean was propped up on his elbow now, stretched out beside her and watching with a little smile on his face. It might've been smug, but then she was feeling a little smug too, after that.

"Girl, can you pick up some haunted panties or something next time you go shopping so I can rescue you again?"

"Bite your tongue!" she said. "You can keep your ghostbusting; I'm never going through that again. You can rescue me from a lobster dinner, how about?"

"I can rescue us from the bill, anyway," he muttered under his breath. "Speaking of which, let's not let your Chinese go to waste. I'm starving."

And after all that, Brooke was surprised to realize she was pretty hungry too.

"After all, we're going to need some energy for round two."

:::

Brooke slept like a baby after Dean finally left, and had already finished her breakfast the next morning when Sam and Dean swung by her place to say goodbye.

"So am I ever going to see you again, or are you the love 'em and leave 'em type?"

Dean grinned at her. "I get around," he said, "but I could probably be convinced to pass this way again."

"So that's how it is, is it?" she said. "You're a drifter. I've never really had a drifter before."

"Always have been, always will be," said Dean, "but it's really good while it lasts."

"Well then, Dean Winchester, next time you pass through give me a call and we can be really good again, all right?" she said. "Preferably without the flames and the broken glass and the ghostbusting."

"I think that can probably be arranged," he said, and he didn't prolong the moment. She was actually kind of glad; that always just got awkward, and she wanted to leave this one on a good note. "But if anything does happen, you know where to reach us."

"I know where to reach you," she said, and leaned against the doorframe as Dean gave her one last kiss good-bye.

**Author's Note:**

> Written for Sarah for her birthday, and posted...just over a year late. So it's for two birthdays! >.>


End file.
